The Birds Who Built No Nest

• 3 minute read
• Ages 6-10
• Jataka Tales

High in the Himalayas there lived a bird with a long tail and no nest.

They were beautiful birds and there were a great many of them, and they roosted in the branches of the trees, in the open, all year round.

The rain

When the cold rain came, which it did every year, they suffered badly.

They sat all night in the branches with the water running off them, shaking, and in the morning, wet through and miserable, they would say to each other that this could not go on and that as soon as it was light and warm they would build proper nests.

"We will start tomorrow."

And then the sun came out.

And by the middle of the day they were dry and comfortable and the branches were pleasant, and building a nest is a great deal of work, and nobody could quite see the point of it while the weather was like this.

So nothing was built.

Every year

This happened every year for as long as anyone could remember.

Every wet night they resolved to build. Every dry morning the resolution went. It was not that they forgot: the story is careful about this. They remembered perfectly well. They simply could not feel it while they were dry.

The monkeys

There were monkeys in that forest who had no shelter either, and one wet season they sat under a tree looking up at the birds shivering above them.

"You have beaks and claws," one of them called up. "You could build something. We cannot. Why do you not?"

And a bird answered honestly, which is the only interesting line in the story.

"Because by the time we can, we do not want to. And by the time we want to, we cannot."

After

The monkeys thought about that for a while.

Then they went and dug themselves a shelter into a bank, in the rain, cold and wet and complaining the entire time, because that was the only moment they were ever going to be sufficiently motivated to do it.

And they were dry the following year, and the year after that, and the birds were not.